The Compassionate Friends (South Africa)

The Compassionate Friends have various self-help groups around South Africa, offering friendship and understanding to bereaved parents and siblings. Contact The Compassionate Friends if you need someone to talk to.

Hospice (South Africa)

Hospice provides palliative care for patients and their families throughout the world. They are an information resource for patients and care givers, helping to alleviate suffering associated with progressive, incurable illness.

Palliative care provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms of life threatening illness. It is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families handling problems associated with terminal illness. Hospice offers a support system and integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care.

The Organ Donor Foundation is a non-profit charity, which aims to address the critical shortage of organ and tissue donors in South Africa. One organ donor can save seven people, 1 heart, 2 lungs, 1 liver, 2 kidneys and 1 pancreas. Organ donation is the ‘gift of life’. Let’s ensure that South Africa remains a centre of excellence for organ and tissue transplantation. Transplants save lives.

Trained counsellors operate the Mental Health Counselling centre and the toll free Suicide Crisis Line every day from 8am to 8pm. The SA Depression and Anxiety group has over 120 support groups nationwide.

The NFDA is the oldest professional body of funeral directors / undertakers in Southern Africa. Its members accept the NFDA’s code of conduct, and minimum health requirements as a basis for doing business. It is recommended to make use of funeral businesses that are members of the NFDA for consumer protection.

International links to resources outside of South Africa

Infants Remembered In Silence (USA)

IRIS offers parents, families, friends and professionals support, education and resources on the death of a child in early pregnancy (miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy etc.), or from premature birth, stillbirth, neo-natal death, birth defects, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), illness and all other types of infant and early childhood death. Grieving is not about forgetting… It is about remembering.

"The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation."

Herman Hesse

"We understand death only after it has laid its hands on someone we love."

Anne L. de Stael

“Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re still alive, it isn’t.”

Richard Bach, (Illusions)

"I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”

Og Mandino

“It's natures way of telling you to slow down.”

Anonymous, (Cited as Madison Avenues latest definition of death.)

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love."

Washington Irving

"Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today"

James Dean

"When you are born you cry and the world is happy, when you die the world cries and you are happy."

from the movie: One Last Thing

"When we are forgotten, we cease to exist."

Lady of the lake, from the movie 'Merlin'

"Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s about learning to dance in the rain"